John Mauldin on Charles Gave’s 10 Bad Omens

We have clearly been in a recent run of higher interest rates, with a looming “threat” that there might be less quantitative easing before the end of the year. It would appear now that Bernanke wants to leave his successor to implement what everyone knows must be coming at some point: a return to a normal interest-rate environment. While rising interest rates are bad for me personally (for another four months), a return to normalcy would be good for our future – though the transition is likely to be bumpy.

With this in mind, I offer this week’s Outside the Box from Louis and Charles Gave. In a brief essay entitled “Bad Omens,” they note:

… if the recent global equity market sell-off can be laid at the feet of the 100bp move higher in US bond yields, it is hard to know how another 50bp increase in real rates will be digested.

In the Conclusion Mauldin or Charles Gave lists the ten bad omens as bullet points:

Conclusion

So here we are, with:

China, the single biggest contributor to global growth over the past decade, slowing markedly.

Short-term interest rates almost everywhere around the world that are unable to go any lower, even as real rates start to creep higher.

Valuations on most equity markets that are nowhere near distressed (except perhaps for the BRICS?).

A World MSCI that has now just dipped below its six month moving average.

A diffusion index of global equity markets that is flashing dark amber.

Margins in the US at record highs and likely to come under pressure, if only because of the rising dollar (most of the US margin expansion of the past decade has occurred thanks to foreign earnings—earnings that may now be challenging to sustain in the face of a weaker global trade growth and a stronger dollar).

Lackluster growth? Falling margins (outside of Japan)? Rising real rates? Unappealing valuations (outside of the BRICS)?… Perhaps these make up the wall of worry that global equities will climb successfully. After all, if the British and Irish Lions can win a rugby series in the Southern hemisphere, while a Scotsman wins Wimbledon, then nothing is impossible. Though perhaps the simpler explanation to the above growing list of bad omens was formulated by Claudius who said that “when sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions”.